When losing J.J. Barea to injury is a massive problem, you’re in it up to your neck. The Dallas Mavericks will be without their mosquito-like guard for at least another month after he tore a calf muscle against the Celtics last week. Most NBA fan bases are quietly pleased when J.J. Barea goes away, but the Mavs need him: Deron Williams has a bum calf too, Devin Harris has yet to play a game this season, and Dirk Nowitzki has been in and (mostly) out of the lineup. That leaves Dallas with Harrison Barnes, Wesley Matthews, and a bunch of offensive zeroes. They suffered an 80-to-64 loss to the Grizz last Friday in which they shot 29 percent from the floor. Gregg Popovich blasted his Spurs in a post-game press conference this past Monday night for only beating the Mavs by five. The team has the worst record in the league and a 0.2 percent chance of finishing .500 or better according to ESPN’s Basketball Power Index. They face the Clippers and Cavs later this week, so you can mark them down for 2-and-13. 

In a league that’s been populated especially heavily over the past few years with shameless tankers and drastic teardown projects, the Mavs have admirably strained to put a good team together each season. You can disparage Mark Cuban and Donnie Nelson’s decision to let Tyson Chandler walk and effectively punt on defending their 2011 championship—the goal was to nab either Dwight Howard or Deron Williams the following offseason, a gambit which probably would have flopped even if either player had joined up—but the Mavs have been, in their post-title years, if not among the NBA’s best, then among the most entertaining teams in the league. It’s remarkable that Rick Carlisle has found ways to wrangle headstrong types like O.J. Mayo and Monta Ellis and rejuvenate ostensibly past-it vets like Vince Carter and Jose Calderon, but the staggering achievement is that Carlisle has made all of it fun to watch. For a half-decade, it’s been a still-tipping Dirk Nowitzki at the elbow, a rotating cast, and whatever strangely gorgeous offense—fluid or set-based, quick or deliberate—Carlisle could come up with. It has always, on one improbable level or another, worked.

That jury-rigged machinery was bound to start groaning and smoking some time. Dirk’s body, which has been like a somehow hurricane-proof chewing gum reinforced papier mache sculpture for a while now, seems to finally be giving out on him. Deron Williams can’t be counted on to stay healthy for two consecutive seasons. Wes Matthews is a useful third or fourth option but he lacks offense-carrying skills. Harrison Barnes is, with his max contract and on-paper talents, a star only in caterpillar-thick air quotes. It’s all going to hell for the Mavs in that unceremonious way it used to go to hell in the age before franchises started writing off entire seasons in July: a few guys are a year too old, a few guys are injured, and most opponents run them off the floor. They aimed to compete for a playoff spot and ended up buried in under a month. 

The Mavs aren’t quite this awful; some of their record is down to crummy luck. But their season is effectively over, and if there’s an organization that’s earned the right to stay on the canvas through the end of April, it’s them. If they want to play Dirk only when he’s feeling 100 percent, that’s fine. If Carlisle wants to see what he’s got in the way of league-fringe youngsters by giving Nicolas Brussino and Justin Anderson some extended burn, he’s entitled to. The Mavs could flip Deron Williams to a contender for a minor asset or two. The Cavs need a backup point guard. Maybe they test out the theory that Barnes isn’t overpaid and try to build the offense around him. There’s no way out of their current predicament; they might as well experiment as the losses pile up. They have no obligation to chase respectability, and they shouldn’t. 

Some of the thrill of sports fandom comes from teams and athletes pushing against their own limitations. We saw this in the Finals last season when the plumb-exhausted Warriors and Cavs staged an epic fourth quarter rock fight for the title, and we’re seeing it this year as DeMar DeRozan’s pretty convincing Kobe Bryant impression persists. It’s satisfying, no matter the stakes, to watch what you thought was just beyond the horizon of possibility. Throughout the Rick Carlisle era, the Mavericks have consistently been better than you would expect and while they haven’t troubled the league’s upper echelon outside of an immensely enjoyable seven-game playoff tilt against the Spurs in 2014, they’ve been inspired nonetheless, getting by on smart signings, good coaching, and Dirk Nowitzki’s long post-prime.

It’s not enough this year. The league’s most regular overachievers have hit the skids. There’s a strong argument to be made for putting the best possible product on the floor each night, and the Mavs have made it eloquently, but they would do well not to push against their limitations, to tinker and consolidate and resolve to get ‘em next year. Williams, regardless of whether the front office moves him or not, is on an expiring contract. Barnes is still only 24. Dirk will either retire this summer or stick around for one last season. While Wes Matthews still doesn’t look right more than a year removed from an achilles tear, he might just need more time, and at worst, with the ballooning cap, any team can survive a single bad contract. It’s not as if the franchise has great prospects going forward, but a top-three lottery selection goes a ways toward seeding optimism.

It may feel like a waste for keen thinkers like Donnie Nelson and Rick Carlisle to apply their smarts toward a passive acceptance of fate. Surely, part of the reason the Mavs haven’t been flat-lousy in a long time is because the folks involved in the team’s day-to-day operation couldn’t bring themselves to brook a season in the NBA basement, so they raged against that possibility even during lean years. But now it’s time to relent. There’s a point at which tenacity becomes self-destructive. If karma has anything to do with how lottery balls bounce, Dallas should land the number one pick in the 2017 draft. Of course, it doesn’t, which is why the act of relenting is important. The Mavs deserve to enter a new, hopeful stage in their history. They just have to allow themselves to cross the threshold.